RANDALL WHITE, NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK, TORONTO. FRIDAY, JUNE 6, 2025. As Andrew Delbanco explains in the May 29, 2025 issue of The New York Review of Books, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic American novel The Great Gatsby was “published on April 10, 1925, to good reviews but disappointing sales.”

So the exact 100th anniversary of this now memorable historical event has come and gone almost two months ago. Yet those of us who only knew about the anniversary from Mr. Delbanco’s May 29 review of The Annotated Great Gatsby (James L.W. West III, ed., Amor Towles, intro) may be forgiven for celebrating the centennial almost two months late.

The ultimate judgements about the book offered by Mr. Delbanco, Alexander Hamilton Professor of American Studies at Columbia University in New York, also strike me as compelling. It has “continued to be read as, among many other things, an indictment of Jazz Age decadence” among monied Americans. Fitzgerald “had measureless contempt for ‘careless people’,” like the highborn characters in The Great Gatsby, who “‘smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money…and let other people clean up the mess they had made.’”

In the end, as Andrew Delbanco concludes, “ first and last, The Great Gatsby is a story of unrequited love that invites rereading or even reciting, as poetry does when there’s too much music in the words to be absorbed in a single listening. However counterfeit Gatsby may sometimes seem, there is … ‘something gorgeous about him,’ something ingenuous in his ‘extraordinary gift for hope.’”

As the summer of 2025 looms, even on the northern North American horizon in Canada, it seems almost impossible not to raise the at least remote possibility that Jay Gatsby — a key if congenitally mysterious figure in the book first published on April 10, 1925 — has something to do with the character of the almost 79-year-old Donald Trump 100 years later.

The crux of any serious comparison of this sort would turn around the, as it were, alienation of both men from the New York region high society of their day. The man who ultimately calls himself Jay Gatsby, Andrew Delbanco explains, is “a lowborn midwesterner … taken under wing by Dan Cody, a man of equally inauspicious origin reared in ‘the savage violence of the frontier brothel and saloon’.” Gatsby “eventually makes his own fortune in the bootlegging business,” He “transforms himself into … a putative Oxford man … on the shore of Long Island Sound in a huge faux-Norman chateau, ‘spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy’.”

The present President Trump was born some two decades later, not in the American midwest but in Queen’s, New York City. He was taken under wing by his father Fred — “a successful real estate developer.” In his mid 20s Donald Trump “took over his father’s real estate company, renaming it the Trump Organization.” From what someone as inexperienced in such matters as I am can judge, the old established high society of New York City has never accepted anyone in the Trump family as one of their own. And at the present height of his worldly success President Donald Trump is based at Mar-a -Lago, on a barrier island in Palm Beach, Florida.

(Even from a more populist angle, in the 2024 US presidential election 68% of New York City voted for Kamala Harris rather than Donald Trump — ranging from 81% in Manhattan to 61% in Queen’s : the only part of New York City that voted for Trump was Staten Island at 64%.)

Beyond sharing some kind of alienation from New York City high society, however, I do not really see much serious similarity between the fictional Jay Gatsby and the all-too-real-world Donald Trump.

No one, for example, would say of the present president of the USA anything quite like Andrew Delbanco’s : “However counterfeit Gatsby may sometimes seem, there is … ‘something gorgeous about him,’ something ingenuous in his ‘extraordinary gift for hope.’” (Though Trump as American president certainly does seem “counterfeit” to me — which is perhaps one other thing he does share with Jay Gatsby.)

Some 100 years after the book’s first publication we know things about the midwesterner Scott Fitzgerald as well that show he himself was in some ways the real model for Jay Gatsby.

Here too none of the women Donald Trump has been involved with seems quite like the “much-pursued Kentucky belle, Daisy Fay, whose voice was ‘a singing compulsion, a whispered Listen’” — the unrequited love of Jay Gatsby, now also living in the New York region, and married to “Tom Buchanan, a rich, stupid, thuggish Chicagoan with a Yale pedigree.” And in the 2020s The Great Gatsby itself is said to have been “inspired by a youthful romance Fitzgerald had with socialite Ginevra King and the riotous parties he attended on Long Island’s North Shore in 1922.”

If there are two people less alike than F. Scott Fitzgerald and Donald Trump I don’t know who they are myself.

(Though the Fitzgerald who “died of alcoholism and heart disease in December 1940,” in his mid 40s, does seem to bear some resemblance to Donald Trump’s older brother Fred Jr., whose “alcoholism … contributed to his fatal heart attack” at the age of 42.)

It would be a wonderful thing, I think, if Donald Trump (or any other president of the USA) actually were in any serious way similar to the “gorgeous” character with an “extraordinary gift for hope,” who Scott Fitzgerald now so memorably created in The Great Gatsby, first published 100 years ago, in the urbane America of the 1920s “Jazz Age,” still held together largely by railroads.

Alas in this as in so many other respects, President Trump in 2025 is a historic disappointment — and (much) worse … .

RANDALL WHITE, NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK, TORONTO. MONDAY, MAY 26, 2025. This is the last day of the Memorial Day long weekend in the USA.

Our version of something similar in Canada was last weekend. (We like to keep things a little different in Canada.) It is now celebrated as Victoria Day — “a federal statutory holiday, as well as a holiday in six of Canada’s ten provinces and all three of its territories.”

When all this began in the old “British North America” of the mid-19th century, Queen Victoria was the monarch and her birthday was May 24, 1819. Originally the holiday that was celebrated in various parts of what is now the Canadian confederation of 1867 was held on the exact day of May 24 . In the more practical recent past Victoria Day “ falls on the Monday between the 18th and the 24th (inclusive) and, so, is always the penultimate Monday of May.”

In an earlier era (which even those as old as I am know mostly from even older tales), “May 24” was popularly known as Firecracker Day, as in this celebrated rhyme : “The 24th of May/Is Firecracker Day/And if they don’t give us a holiday/We’ll all quit school.” (There are other slightly different versions : this is the one I learned from my mother long ago, I think.)

Personally I like the name Firecracker Day much better than Victoria Day. I see no good reason for celebrating the birthday of the old Queen Victoria (1819–1901) in 2025. But firecrackers are always worth celebrating (safely of course). And the main point of the late May holiday is that : “It is informally considered the start of the summer season in Canada.”

We did have public fireworks displays here in Toronto last Monday night. One took place not far from my house. (We could see at least the edges of the main bursts of colourful explosion from our second-floor balcony, as usual.)

Today, I want to celebrate the real 24th of May with three notes on current politics in the United States, Canada, and Alberta (and Quebec).

(1) Marc Elias : “It is only by stripping Republicans of power that we are going to have a real check on Donald Trump”

Marc Elias is “an American elections attorney for the Democratic Party. He founded Democracy Docket, a website focused on voting rights and election litigation in the United States, in 2020. He left his position as a partner at Perkins Coie to start the Elias Law Group in 2021.”

Read the rest of this page »

RANDALL WHITE, “CANADA’S CAPITAL REGION FROM FOUR HOURS AND FORTY MINUTES WEST”. FRIDAY, MAY 16, 2025. Prime Minister Mark Carney’s new Canadian federal cabinet held its first meeting the day before yesterday.

One of its “first orders of business” was a “tax cut for the middle class. Starting July 1, hard-working Canadians will keep more of their paycheques.”

This certainly underlines why some observers have wondered why Liberal PM Carney didn’t run for the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada. (And finally run on the track former Conservative PM Stephen Harper tried to set him on back when.)

Yet even an only slightly closer look at the members of Mr. Carney’s “smaller, focused cabinet with mix of veteran MPs, new faces, and several role changes” suggests a more complex and ultimately serious (North American) “liberal” edge to Canada’s new government in Ottawa.

(1) General shape of things to come (according to CBC News)

PM Carney’s new cabinet has 28 ministers, and 10 secretaries of state (“a long-dormant designation Carney is reviving” — these secretaries will not attend full cabinet meetings : only those where their specific responsibilities are involved). It includes “a mix of many new faces and some veterans.”

The full group of 38 includes “24 new people — 13 of them recently elected …Speaking to reporters after the swearing-in ceremony, Carney pitched the cabinet overhaul as a nod to Canadians’ desire for change … ‘We’re going to deliver on that mandate with a new team, purpose-built for this hinge moment in Canada’s history … We’ve been elected to do a job and we intend to do it quickly and forcefully’.”

Read the rest of this page »

GREG BARNS SC. HOBART, MELBOURNE, BRISBANE, PERTH, AUSTRALIA. MONDAY, MAY 5, 2025. Newly minted Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and his Liberals have something in common with the winner of Australia’s national election on Saturday, Anthony Albanese and the Australian Labor Party (ALP). Both brought their governments back from the brink of defeat partly because of the Trumpian tinge of the conservative opposition parties.

Mr Albanese, Prime Minister since 2022, led his party to a thumping victory – one not predicted by even the most optimistic of polls. With votes still being counted, a product of Australia’s preferential voting system, Mr Albanese’s party, at the time of writing has won 86 seats in the 151 seat house of representatives, with the Liberal and National Party Coalition reduced to 39, and with minor parties such as the Greens (1) and independents (11) holding the rest. 12 seats are still close to call.

In an extraordinary coincidence like the Conservatives Pierre Poilievre, Mr Albanese’s opposite number Peter Dutton lost his seat in suburban Brisbane.

As recently as six months ago Mr Albanese and his government was heading for defeat. The Prime Minister would have been the first since James Scullin in 1931 to lose government after one term. And that was in the middle of the Great Depression. Going into this election campaign, as in Canada cost of living issues and interest rates were dominant, and the Coalition parties fuelled so called ‘culture wars’, capitalising on the disastrous Constitutional referendum championed by Mr Albanese in 2023 that would have given Indigenous Australians an advisory voice in the national parliament.

But then came Donald Trump and, it has to be said, a distastrous campaign by Mr Dutton. Mr Dutton, like Mr Poilievre, tried to distance himself from President Trump, but when under pressure in the election campaign reverted to Trumpian rhetoric and tactics, including blaming what he called ‘hate’ media.

While Mr Albanese has been circumspect in his handling in the Trumpian world, particularly on the 10 per cent tariff imposed on Australia, Mr Dutton was telling Australians he would be a better bet to deal with the narcissistic and chaotic American President.

Read the rest of this page »

RANDALL WHITE, “CANADA’S CAPITAL REGION FROM FOUR HOURS AND FORTY MINUTES WEST”. SATURDAY, MAY 3, 2025. I should make two (or maybe three) things clear up front.

First, I am a (somewhat cranky?) 80- year-old man who was born in Canada. I have lived here all my life, with brief exceptions for travel abroad. I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, with enthusiasms somewhat different from the 2020s and 2030s. Inevitably I will not be around to enjoy and/or endure much more of any longer term Canadian future.

Second, I did vote for the candidate of the Carney Liberals in my local electoral district on April 28, 2025. Early on in my history as a now well-seasoned participant in federal and provincial elections I voted New Democrat. Then I started voting Liberal on some occasions, New Democrat on others. Most recently I have mostly voted Liberal. And — to finally put my money where my mouth is — in this 2025 campaign I donated $100 to the Liberal Party of Canada.

I should no doubt also note that for more than a few years I have somewhat actively supported the broad political view that the ultimate destiny of the 1867 confederation in Canada is a Canadian parliamentary democratic republic, broadly on the model already pioneered by such fellow former self-governing British dominions as Ireland and India.

With all this relevant background duly noted, I want to make clear my massive, heartfelt protest over the news that “King Charles to travel to Canada, deliver throne speech … Visit will mark the 1st time a monarch has delivered the throne speech since 1977.”

Or to cite what newly elected PM Carney has himself posted on Twitter/X: “Later this month, Canada will have the privilege of welcoming Their Majesties The King and Queen to Canada — where His Majesty King Charles III will deliver Canada’s speech from the throne … This historic honour matches the weight of our times.”

Read the rest of this page »

RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO. WEDNESDAY, APRIL 30, 2025. The more or less final results of the 2025 Canadian federal election were still not fully known with certainty, even as we approached dinner on the day after election day.

It has nonetheless been clear since late on election day (Monday, April 28) that Liberal leader Mark Carney will at least be prime minister (and form a government), as leader of the party with the largest number of seats in the Canadian House of Commons.

What remained not altogether clear until possibly late in the evening of the day after the election was exactly how many seats each party will have — and whether the Carney Liberals with the largest number of seats will also have a working majority of seats in the House (and can thus rest secure in parliament until the next fixed date election in the fall of 2029).

(1) A short-lived Carney minority government ??

Now on the second day after the 2025 election it finally seems clear enough that the Liberals will not quite manage to win the 172 seats that constitute a bare majority in the House. The basic “preliminary results” as reported by Elections Canada, as of 9:04 PM, April 29, 2025 (with 99.9% of all polls reporting) are :

LIB 169 seats, 43.7% vote
CON 144 seats, 41.3% vote
BQ  22 seats, 6.3% vote
NDP 7 seats, 6.3% vote
Other 1 seat, 2.4% vote
Total 343 seats, 100.0% vote.

On similar preliminary numbers, 19,597,674 of 28,525,638 registered electors or 68.7 % actually turned out to vote in 2025. This is considerably above the historic low voter turnout in a Canadian federal election of 58.8% in 2008, but also considerably below the highest turnout of 79.4% in 1958. (And turnout in the four elections immediately preceding 2025 was 61.1% in 2011, 68.3% in 2015, 67.0% in 2019, and 62.6% in 2021.)

In 2025 results were so close in several of the 343 local “ridings” accounted for in the above table (officially “electoral districts” nowadays) that there will be automatic recounts in some cases. Apparently this could change the above numbers somewhat. Again, however, the current smart money seems convinced that none of this will be enough to give the Carney Liberals a majority in parliament, all by themselves.

Read the rest of this page »

COUNTERWEIGHTS EDITORS. GANATSEKWYAGON, ON. , MONDAY, APRIL 21, 2025. UPDATED. SATURDAY 26 APRIL/SUNDAY 27 APRIL 2025. SCROLL BELOW FOR UPDATE TEXT. The 2025 Canadian federal election, which may or may not be “the most important election of our lives, ” will take place exactly one week from today.

It says a lot about how short, sweet, and sometimes more or less elevated a campaign it has been over the past few weeks that this is the first time we counterweights editors have pulled ourselves together for some group comment.

We start with the French and then English TV debates — Wednesday 16 April and Thursday 17 April this past week. The Canadian Press report on the second English debate is headlined : “’You, sir, are not a change’: Party leaders target Carney in final election debate.”

To all of us the trouble with Poilievre’s rhetoric that “You, sir, are not a change” is that Mark Carney in some apparently crucial sense is for many a welcome change from Justin Trudeau.

And insofar as there are some Trudeau Liberal cabinet carry-overs, that is, as Carney himself urged in the English debate, a good thing. It seasons the fresh new faces with hard-earned experience and outstanding talent.

Or as Globe and Mail columnist Lawrence Martin tweeted/X-posted after the English contest : “Carney’s best debate moment. ‘I know it may be difficult, Mr. Poilievre, you spent years running against Justin Trudeau and the carbon tax. They’re both gone, okay? They’re both gone.’”

Read the rest of this page »

RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO. MONDAY, APRIL 14, 2025. Bill Maher has been surprised that the crazy public Donald Trump we see on TV and so forth is not the real Donald Trump you meet when you have dinner with him at Mar-a-Lago.

Unlike Mr. Maher I am a Canadian, born and raised. I have largely lived, worked, and worshiped in Canada my entire life — a circumstance shared with millions of (if by no means all) other Canadians. (In 2021 some 74% of people living in Canada [91% of whom were Canadian citizens] had been born in Canada.)

My most immediate problem with Donald Trump, in other words, is his (almost) latest attitude towards Canada.

I agree he has at least kept this attitude under the covers in the most recent past. Along with my TV-watching partner I also believe the ultimate crux of Donald Trump’s now altogether clearly expressed hatred of Canada as an independent country flows from the patently obvious attraction of the two most important women in his life to former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Whatever its deepest source, this hatred was finally expressed so strongly early in 2025 that many Canadians (a very solid majority on all the polling evidence I’ve seen) cannot possibly entertain any good thoughts about Donald Trump — even of the sort Bill Maher has been offering lately.

Read the rest of this page »

RANDALL WHITE, NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK, TORONTO. SUNDAY, APRIL 6, 2025. Nothing captures the bizarre concoction of arrogance and ignorance shown by both President Trump II and so many who work for him as the 10% US tariff they have foisted on two islands near Antarctica, inhabited only by penguins (and some of their friends, the seals).

To ice the cake, one of the president’s over-aggressive and allegedly eminent accomplices has almost at the same time urged a TV audience to just let Donald Trump fix the global economy.

Again and again over the next three years and seven months ??

The obvious first question is what role will the penguins on the Territory of Heard Island and McDonald Islands play in the new economic structure? Or, of course, how can anyone of any sense at all trust a US federal administration that puts tariffs on islands of penguins to even fail honourably in such a vast and complex enterprise as restructuring the world economy?

To be altogether fair, it seems that some blame here must be shouldered by World Bank statistics.

Perhaps because “some goods may have been mislabeled as coming from the territory,” the World Bank apparently had the penguins exporting “about $1.4 million worth of … unspecified ‘machinery and electrical’ products to the U.S. in 2022 … while the U.S. exported about $21,600 to the islands in the same year.”

Down on the ground, in fact (and of course again), the penguins do not have any machinery and electrical manufacturing plants on the Heard and McDonald islands. And they might find a few crates of Florida oranges attractive, but do they really know how to peel them properly?

Whatever, President Trump II has been in office only two months and change. Already his aging mind has managed to transfer some of its own vast chaos and anxiety to the wider global village, in ways that even close students of Trump I may not have expected.

The inevitable question is just what’s next? And it may arise again and again over the next three years and seven months.

Read the rest of this page »

SPECIAL FROM ROB SPARROW, HIGH PARK, TORONTO. MARCH 26, 2025. Calling the 2024 Toronto Blue Jays anything less than a disaster would be generous. This was a team built to contend—at least in theory—but instead, it collapsed in historic fashion, ending with a dismal 74-88 record, finishing dead last in the AL East for the first time since 2013.

The numbers tell the story of an offensive collapse years in the making. The Blue Jays’ runs scored cratered from 846 in 2021 to 671 in 2024 – their lowest full-season total since 1997. Home runs – down from 262 in 2021 (the most in baseball) to just 156, the worst long-ball output in a full season since 2008. Batting average – down to .241, the team’s worst since the early ‘80s, when beloved broadcaster Buck Martinez was the team’s light-hitting catcher.

It didn’t help that the roster was constructed around the flawed hope that internal improvement could offset previous mistakes.

Moreover, the strategic decision over the past couple years to prioritize “run prevention” over offensive firepower—exemplified by trading away of Fan Favourites and Home Run Jacket founding members Teoscar Hernández and Lourdes Gurriel Jr.—has backfired badly.

A) Last Place Finish…Rotten to the Core…

In one sense, the 2024 season was a referendum on the Mark Shapiro-Ross Atkins front office, now entering its 10th year. When they took over in 2016, they inherited an aging but playoff-calibre roster. The teardown that followed was supposed to lay the foundation for a sustainable winner. Sure, the Jays endured bad years in 2018 and 2019, but those were expected rebuilding seasons. The unexpected playoff appearance in the COVID-shortened 2020 campaign, and the near miss by a game in the 2021 season, raised expectations that the 2020s decade of Blue Jay baseball held much promise.

Instead, both the 2022 and 2023 seasons concluded in two game wild card sweeps, ending with both a thump and a whimper. The thump being the collapse against the Mariners in ‘22 when they led 8-1 in Game 2, and the whimper being their loss to the Twins in ’23, headlined by their aggressive move to lift José Berríos early, and being held to just one run over the two-game series.

Read the rest of this page »